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 News from Around the Americas | March 2008 
Prosecutors in U.S., Mexico Agree to Combat Money Laundering
 Jacques Billeaud - Associated Press
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Phoenix – Prosecutors from Mexico and America pledged to focus more aggressively on combatting money laundering by drug and immigrant smugglers who wire their illegal proceeds into Mexico from the United States.
The prosecutors, who completed a conference Wednesday in Phoenix on fighting border crime, agreed that Mexican authorities will use investigative techniques developed in Arizona to try to disrupt the flow of smuggling money into Mexico.
State prosecutors in Arizona credit their past monitoring of wire transfers for disrupting smuggling networks, but their approach was put on hold a year ago after a judge ruled it violated constitutional protections on interstate and international commerce.
Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, leader of the prosecutors groups that held the conference, said his state will advise Mexican authorities on separating legitimate money transfers from those by made smugglers and responding to the methods that traffickers use to evade investigators.
“If we can stop the flow of funds, if we can interrupt that, we will make the largest possible dent in trafficking,” Goddard said.
The prosecutors also agreed to exchange information on immigrant trafficking groups and expand undercover investigations of illegal gun sales.
“We must strengthen our coordination of actions with all law enforcement institutions in the United States and Mexico,” said Noe Ramirez Mandujano, an assistant Mexican attorney general who leads his government's organized crime prosecutions.
For more than four years, state prosecutors in Arizona had gotten more than 20 special court orders that allowed them to seize millions of dollars in wire transfers that authorities said were payments to smugglers.
Prosecutors said the efforts in Arizona had disrupted smuggling networks so much that traffickers had payments routed from other American states to Mexico, even as they continued to sneak people in through Arizona.
A wire transfer company had challenged the first effort by state prosecutors to stop the flow of smuggling money into the northern Mexican state of Sonora. A judge ruled in favor of the company.
Prosecutors from both countries agreed to hold meetings to analyze selected money transfers from the United States to Mexico. |
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